Gay Rights As an International Human Rights Norm: the Rise and Fall of the 2009 Ugandan Anti- Homosexuality Bill

1 Gay Rights as an International Human Rights Norm: The Rise and Fall of the 2009 Ugandan Anti- Homosexuality Bill By Daniel Hall Key Terms Anti-Homosexuality Bill Baptist-Burqa Network The Family Culture of Homophobia Transnational Gay-Rights Network David Bahati Doug Coe Senator Jim Inhofe Christian Scott Lively Case Early Stages of the Global Culture War Transnational gay rights networks were small and narrow in their focus during the 1970s and 1980s. While organized international opposition to gay rights had yet to emerge, battles surrounding women’s rights and family planning revealed the domestic contours of a conservative sensibility. For instance, U.S. singer Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign successfully reversed a county anti-discrimination ordinance in the late 1970s.1 These, in turn, were grafted onto the gay rights issue. The 1975 UN Conference on Women, in Mexico City, was the first institutionalized discussion of LGBT rights activism, which grew into the founding of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (IGLA). Today ILGA is at the center of a network of more than 670 NGOs in more than 110 countries, providing support to national groups and coordinating transnational advocacy efforts. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) was founded in 1990 in a one-room office in San Francisco. Today, IGLHRC is a large network supporting local partners in their fight against gay human rights violations in many countries and has achieved official status with the UN. It manages annual revenues of $1.7 million and eighteen staff members in New York, Buenos Aires, and Cape Town.2 In an attempt to respond strategically to the hostilities in the environment, the gay rights network focused on the issues of discrimination and violence at international women’s conferences. The strategic advantage in this, according to activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, was that heterosexuals perceived lesbians as less threatening and more vulnerable than gay men.3 In the 1980’s, gay men became more visible transnational advocates for gay rights at a series of World 2 Health Organization meetings. They used the “unwelcome opportunity” of the AIDS crisis to frame themselves as a victimized minority deserving of special protection and care.4 In the late 1990s, successful gains within many nation states catalyzed the scope of transnational gay rights activism to expand from discrimination, violence, and health issues to challenging the UN to recognize sexual orientation and gender identity as human rights norms.5 The transnational conservative family values organizations took a decisive stance against gay rights organizations as early as 1985; at the UN Women’s Conference in Nairobi that year, lesbian rights advocates were driven from the forum. The gay rights network was marginalized again at the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development where opposition was rooted in resistance to family planning. American scholar Clifford Bob describes this opposition as the “Baptist-burqa network,” seeing as the Vatican forged an alliance with Islamic delegates to block proposals that would make access to abortions more accessible. The Baptist-burqa network grew to encompass the governments of conservative Islamic, African, and Caribbean nations and of course the Vatican, which possesses special observer status in the United Nations. As it developed, its agenda broadened to protect “traditional” families from “gendered” families and homosexuality.6 Though the Baptist-burqa’s agenda in the early 1990s was anti-abortion, the network evolved to encompass broader conservative family values. American Christian right groups such as the the Catholic Human Rights Institute and the Family First foundation enjoy close ties with Muslim faith leaders. The Baptist-Burqa network frequents the Organization of the Islamic Conference for alignment on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. Successful gay rights movements on national levels helped mobilize world leaders to advocate for gay rights on an international stage. By 2000, the European Union and the Council of Europe became vocal gay rights supporters at UN conferences, improving remarkably from the ill-fated Nairobi conference of 1985. Alongside states stood many multinational corporations such as the Ford Foundation, which provided support from the early 1990s, and the Arcus Foundation and Soros Foundation, which have provided monetary support in the 2000s. Major human rights NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch joined in the mid-1990s, offering resources and contacts and giving authority and credibility to the gay rights network.7 In response to the gains made by the gay rights network for influence at the international level, the conservative family values network mobilized in the early 2000s to provide a counter-force. This network began lobbying governments in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, which had large populations opposed to gay rights on the basis of religion, with the intent to develop a “pro- family bloc” within the UN. As a result of their lobbying, the conservative family values network succeeded in using fear tactics and post-colonial resentment to stoke the flames of nationalism in some Caribbean, Asian, and African nations. The outcome has been that the gay rights network is now perceived in some nations, such as Uganda, as a neo-colonial force pushing a Western agenda of homosexual indoctrination.8 3 The Ugandan Climate of Homophobia Uganda, once a British colony, is a nation with a short but strong association with Christianity. Relative to the rest of Africa, Christianity arrived rather late to Uganda. Called Buganda at the time, missionaries did not arrive in the African kingdom until 1877, almost one hundred years after the influx of missionaries from Europe had begun. In just 25 years however, Uganda became one of the most successful mission fields on the continent. Much of this is thanks to Kabaka (King) Muteesa who opened Buganda up to trade with the outside world. The exchange of goods with Swahili and Arab traders from Zanzibar brought many things, including the faith of Islam. The introduction of a monotheistic “book of god” religion helped pave the way for Christianity, which arrived to decades later. In 1877 British explorer Henry Morten Stanley made contact with Muteesa and described him in a letter to the Daily Telegraph as someone eager to hear the Gospel and spread it throughout his kingdom. The Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) quickly put together a group of missionaries, the first two arriving in the summer of 1877. Less then two year later a group of French Catholic White Fathers arrived and began to spread their faith as well. In 1894 the British Empire took control of the Buganda kingdom and annexed other surrounding kingdoms to form the Uganda Protectorate (current day Uganda). With Anglicanism being the official religious denomination of the British government, it became the preeminent religious denomination of the Uganda Protectorate. All heads of ethnic kingdoms, the heads of the local Government of the Uganda Protectorate, all heads of sectional governments and all heads of anything that politically mattered in the Protectorate were expected to be Anglicans. Anglican growth thrived by the turn of the 20th century as the Anglican Church heavily provided resources in areas of education and public health. Catholicism also continued to have a presence and began pushing its own development goals under Pope Paul VI. The Christian faith would continue to spread and imbed itself into Uganda’s society throughout the 20th century. Today it is the dominant religion in the country with roughly 85% of the country identifying as Christian, 42% as Roman Catholics and 36% Anglicans. Its population in 2010 was 33.5 million, nearly 7 times the population only 50 years previously. In an effort to eliminate violence between the country’s nearly 30 distinct ethnic sects, the government in 1986 began substantially restricting political parties’ actions. In rural parts of the country, traditional indigenous religious, medicinal, and cultural practices still dominate the communities. For LGBT persons living in Uganda, discrimination and harassment by the media, police, teachers, and other groups were and continue to be part and parcel of daily life. Harassment ranges from blackmail and death threats to “correctional rape” and killings. Many of the estimated half a million LGBT Ugandans feel compelled to keep their sexual identities hidden.9 The government is often complicit in maintaining this culture of stigmatization, condoning and contributing to an atmosphere of hate in explicit and implicit ways. According to Jessica Stern, researcher in the LGBT rights program of Human Rights Watch, "[Uganda] President Yoweri Museveni's government routinely threatens and vilifies lesbians and gays, and subjects sexual rights activists to harassment.”10 Stern continues: “At a moment when sensational [media] publicity has spread fear among a whole community, the authorities must exercise their responsibility to protect, not persecute."11 Such leadership from government authorities has been virtually nonexistent. 4 Ugandan legal prohibitions against homosexual acts originated in the laws of 19th century British colonial rulers. After independence, the homosexual prohibitions were retained and enshrined in the Penal Code Act of 1950, criminalizing such behavior as "carnal acts against the order of nature."12 The current penalty for engaging in homosexual acts is life imprisonment. LGBT persons have virtually no legal protections under Ugandan law. On September 29, 2005, President Yoweri Museveni further curtailed rights for LGBT persons by signing into law a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. This act made Uganda only the second country in the world to do so and one of three countries to date.13 According to the amendment, “marriage is lawful only if entered into between a man and a woman,” and “it is unlawful for same-sex couples to marry."14 Any defiance of the status quo is quickly met with moral outrage and punitive legal action.

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